Originally written 12 November 2007
My Turkish classes have run for more than a week now, in a language-teaching centre operated by the University of Ankara. It is housed in a handsome art-deco-ish building that still has an Ottoman calligraphy over the front door and classrooms that give out onto a wonderland of fire escapes and crazy back walls and tiny back yards amid high chasms of those walls. It stands on a side street off the Istiklal, close to the famous Haci Baba restaurant.
Learning a new language is tiring and frustrating, but also one of my greatest pleasures, a series of revelations being sparked off as each element of the language snaps into place, with ease or difficulty, and the disjointed shards of vocabulary and structure begin to coalesce. But that is a while off yet - for now it's shards and more shards, and we feel good if we can make sentences with two words in them. I expect to post regular items on the language as it goes along, just to draw attention to some of the interesting aspects. Who knows, for example, whether the English name Anne is drawn from Turkish anne, 'mother'? And in Turkish baba means a father, grandfather or wise old man, whereas in Russian it is an old woman and in other places it is a baby.
Exotic it is, but not in the big landscapes that I'd hoped. There are nouns, verbs, adjectives just as we have them, there are recognisable accusative and dative cases, tenses and the rest. Punctuation is an unknown, word order is fascinatingly different and the famous agglutinative system of endings, in which a one-syllable root gets easily lost in two inches of baggage attached to it unless you are well attuned. I had hoped for a real space trip, to a linguistic world that was utterly different, the ways that relationships and things are named and distinguished quite other. Perhaps it is the use of familiar grammatical terminology that destroys this, flattening the parts of the language into our predetermined ideas of what verbs, nouns, etc look like and do; perhaps, from a native point of view, these things have a quite different taste. Meanwhile it is equally possible that such desired strangeness simply does not exist, because the conditions of life are so similar for all peoples of the world that the same linguistic systems, within certain limits, inevitably arise - the view of self and world, of us and them, of living thing and inanimate object, of nature and culture, the world of having to get food, of having relationships, of a public culture, of being willy-nilly a part of an economy. I will never know until the language is well established in me - at which point, of course, its newness is lost as the necessary, indeed crucial familiarity is attained, the neural paths become consolidated and one does not have to scratch around for every word and every scrap of ending to put on it. This familiarity comes at a certain cost, in losing that newness, the heights and the deeps of the language itself as experience; wearing it now for business purposes, for looking out, we forget the colour of the garment. Still, for the observant there are dwelling-places between these extremes.
As new and enjoyable as the brightly-coloured words are the people here. In our own class of twelve, two are from Mongolia (and have, apart from beginners' Turkish, no language other than their native with which to talk to anybody), one from Kyrgyzstan and one from Russian Tatarstan, another from Urumqui in Xinjiang - a veritable Silk Road of my fantasies - plus representatives of Ukraine, Argentina, Korea, Spain and the USA. Go out of our classroom into the cramped smoky cafeteria in the basement and you will find a tall, dark-eyed youth from Iran who weeps when he reads the poetry of Hafiz, a pumped-up American who turns out to be from Armenia and to speak that language perfectly, whose basketball machismo goes soft when I ask him about that country; an Italian here to research the politics of the Hittites, a posse of noisy Russian blondes, and those are the product of just one week's worth of coffee breaks. It is moving and instructive, after any exposure to the squalling of conflict as portrayed in the media, be it the railing of leaders or the blind hate of regional factions, to hear these keen young people hanging out together with complete trust and a social web - based on their all being strangers here, but also feeling themselves aristocratic in a world based on education and connectivity. Each comes as a jewel from his or her own land, yet here they are all flesh of my flesh and of one another's, their concerns are shared and life is too much fun for disagreements. I am not too old to dream, and plenty naive enough; and see how a man contains both aspects, the possibility of aggression and enmity on the one hand, in trying to defend, or establish, his own, or work out a perceived injustice, while also dreaming of harmony and peace among the nations, himself included. When it is called forth in us by a real signal, we respond.
